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Over the past year, I’ve sporadically attempted to migrate from using my paper logbook to use more electronic forms of logging. I have been using EMACS journal mode as a form of log. Its offline nature means that I now have at least 3 separate journals around the place. Merging them shouldn’t be too challenging because they each consist of entries that aren’t replicated in any of the other journals.

I’ve been gradually forming what I want/need in my mind:

Accessible anywhere (any PC – I imagine it would pretty difficult to access if one only had access to a sheep) – note this doesn’t mean Java/Python etc.

Accessible and editable whilst offline

Store all the projects that I work on in it.

It should be possible to search it. To what extent, I don’t know. Even just the ability to search by date is good. Tagging would be useful for separating projects.

I’d like to be able to edit bits of it that I’ve previously written. I think that I wouldn’t want to replace the edited post in the log; just create an amended version that’s associated with today’s date (perhaps entries would be editable during a specified time window – perhaps 1 day – of course, if someone didn’t want anything to become read-only, they could turn this off). I want to be able to read the log in a date-ordered way, and therefore any edits should appear in the log – perhaps associated with the previous

I’d like to attach files to it.

Potentially link emails into it in some way.

Import Git repositories into it. Associate a repository with some posts – refer to commits from log entries etc. Tracking forking of Git repositories for different projects would be fantastic.

I’ve recently started thinking about how I’d want to embed files into it. At the moment, I have loads of small bits of code flying around. Every so often I write a small piece of test code; for example, I recently wrote a quick test program to work out how to use threads from Python – something that I already did just over a year ago, but no longer have the files. Importing those files or Git repositories into the journal and the ability to associate them with something that I was doing would be amazing.

I’ve no idea if a bit of software exists that does these things. Maybe I should look. I think I once heard of a piece of software for managing multiple git repositories – that would be a small fraction what I want.

Naturally, when I achieve some e-paper, I would need to be able to add sketches to this log…